White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled - the best books of 1866

The best book of 1866 is so obvious that it is barely worth disagreeing, but as Raskolnikov says himself, “The wrong form, you mean – the aesthetics aren’t right!” (VI.7, tr. Oliver Ready).  My favorite book of 1866 is not Crime and Punishment but Victor Hugo’s staggering and preposterous man-against-nature – man-against-hurricane – man-against-octopus – epic The Toilers of the Sea, illustrated above.  The steamboat pictured is about to get stuck on a strange rock formation, and the hero will spend most of the novel fighting everything Hugo can throw at him to get it moving again.  “Then, taking up in the hollow of his hand a little water from a pool of rainwater, he drank it and cried to the clouds: ‘Fooled you!’”  That’s right, he is insulting the clouds, defying the cosmos, as one does in a Victor Hugo book.

Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler this year, too, alongside Crime and Punishment, under contractual conditions that would have crushed most writers.  Now there is some kind of heroism.  I would like to read a Victor Hugo novel about Dostoevsky writing Crime and Punishment and The Gambler.

Henrik Ibsen’s Brand is from 1866, as well, about another defier of the cosmos.  Brand, Raskolnikov, and Hugo’s hero – big characters in big stories.

I do not believe I have read any English-language novels from the year.  Wilkie Collins’s Armadale, George Eliot’s Felix Holt, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, just barely unfinished, would be likely candidates for the Booker Prize, if there had been such a thing.  Gaskell had never won the prize, beat by Thackeray, Dickens, and Trollope, so I think she picks this one up posthumously.  I am just making this up.  Like I care about prizes.

It was a broadly interesting year for poetry.  Paul Verlaine published his first book, Poèmes saturniens, which I have only read in part, and of course in English.  The French looks like this, from “Chansons d’automne,” one of Verlaine’s best-known poems:

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
     De l'automne
Blessent mon cœur
D'une langueur
     Monotone.

Lip-smacking French verse.  Those first three lines, those vowels, those nasalizations.  Maybe the poem also means something.

Algernon Swinburne’s first books of lyrics, Poems and Ballads, appeared, ruining English poetry for decades until austere, brutal Modernists dynamited and carted off his lush, sweet gibberish:

from Hymn to Proserpine

Where beyond the extreme sea-wall, and between the remote sea-gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death waits:
Where, mighty with deepening sides, clad about with the seas as with wings,
And impelled of invisible tides, and fulfilled of unspeakable things,
White-eyed and poisonous-finned, shark-toothed and serpentine-curled,
Rolls, under the whitening wind of the future, the wave of the world.

It is like The Toilers of the Sea turned into English verse.  Swinburne was Hugo’s greatest English champion.

Christina Rossetti’s second book, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems seemed like a paler version of her brilliant first book, but I’ll note it, at least.

In the United States, Herman Melville published Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, his debut as a poet and his first book in a decade, the first of all too few volumes of poetry.  Even more surprising somehow is James Greenleaf Whittier’s nostalgic, ironic “Snow-Bound,” surprising because Whittier was generally such a bad poet, but one who occasionally wrote a great poem.  Whether the torments inflicted by the poem on several generations of schoolchildren are to the demerit of Whittier I leave to the conscience of the individual reader.  Those days are long past.

Crime and Punishment translations - comparing Ready and Garnett

How different is the new Oliver Ready translation of Crime and Punishment from other translations?  I don’t know!  It felt different.  Zippy.  I read Constance Garnett long ago.  Let’s take a look.

There was a momentary silence.  Pyotr Petrovich slowly took out a cambric handkerchief reeking of perfume and blew his nose with the air of a virtuous man who has suffered a wound to his pride and who, moreover, is determined to receive an explanation.  (IV.2, 277, Ready)

A moment’s silence followed.  Pyotr Petrovitch deliberately drew out a cambric handkerchief reeking of scent and blew his nose with an air of a benevolent man who felt himself slighted, and was firmly resolved to insist on an explanation.  (Garnett)

Both versions are hilarious.  What a nose-blowing.  Both are similar, as is typical with translations of novels.  Most of the different choices by Ready are in the same direction – “slowly” replaces “deliberately,” “perfume” replaces “scent,” “virtuous” replaces “benevolent,” and so on.  Case after case, Ready chooses the word more commonly used today.  It is just an update, the language of my time instead of that of a hundred years ago, and as a result I find, however accustomed I am to reading English from that time, that the book is lighter on its feet.

Whether Ready is correcting or introducing errors, I can’t say.  But I can see the modernizing.  I also find “virtuous” funnier than “benevolent,” but I will bet just because it is closer to my natural English.

A bit of Raskolnikov’s confession to Sonya, a scene of great intensity that would likely stand up to some pretty incompetent translation.  Raskolnikov’s mention of a spider invokes his evil dream double Svidrigailov, who is often linked to spiders:

“Nonsense!  I just killed.  I killed for myself, for myself alone; and whether I’d become anyone’s benefactor or spend my entire life as a spider, catching everyone in my web and sucking out their vital juices, shouldn’t have mattered to me one jot at that moment!...”  (V.4, 393, Ready)

“Nonsense!  I simply did it; I did the murder for myself, for myself alone, and whether I became a benefactor to others, or spent my life like a spider catching men in my web and sucking the life out of men, I couldn’t have cared at that moment…”  (Garnett)

Is “did the murder” a little fussy?  Otherwise, the only issue in Garnett is the odd repetition of “men” when “them” would be unambiguous.  Is Garnett being a literalist here, reproducing a hiccup in the original?  Or is Ready thinking it’s normal Russian and should sound like normal English?

A little more of the spider, from Svidrigailov’s great chapter:

Waking up, flies attached themselves to the untouched portion of veal on the table next to him.  He looked at them for a long time and eventually began trying to catch one with his free right hand.  He tried and tried, but with no success.  Finally, catching himself at this peculiar task, he came to his senses, shuddered, got up and walked straight out of the room.  (VI.6, 479, Ready)

Some flies woke up and settled on the untouched veal, which was still on the table.  He stared at them and at last with his free right hand began trying to catch one.  He tried till he was tired, but could not catch it.  At last, realizing that he was engaged in this interesting pursuit, he started, got up and walked resolutely out of the room.  (Garnett)

The last line, in Garnett, is bizarre.  “Interesting pursuit” sounds like a sarcastic comment from the narrator.  I find Ready’s choices – “tried and tried,” “shuddered” – more frightening, a better fit with the nightmarish tone of the dreams (and reality) of the chapter.

Translation of novels are mostly quite similar.  The differences between Ready and Garnett are numerous but, choice by choice, small.  Taken together the differences somehow lift a bit of the weight off the novel, or add a little more energy.

I sincerely hope that Ready is encouraged by the success of this translation to translate not more Dostoevsky, of which we have plenty, but other old books that have never made it into English.

a few enigmatic words before immediately lapsing back into nonsense again - Crime and Punishment's reality

Near the end of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky makes a strange move that adds a new layer to the novel and threatens to destroy it:

For Raskolnikov. a strange time had begun: it was as if a fog had suddenly descended, trapping him in hopeless, oppressive isolation…  He was absolutely convinced that he’d been mistaken about many things, such as the duration and timing of certain events…  He had, for example, mixed up one event with another, and considered a third to be the consequence of something that had happened solely in his imagination…  (VI.1, 413)

I do not know if I am supposed to identify those specific events.  Should I work back through the novel, sorting events – real, imaginary, unclear?  My sense is that the exercise is largely pointless.  Other novelists will take care of the problem, writing the story where the murdered only imagines that he commits the murder and so on.  Vladimir Nabokov wrote one.  At least one.

But if Dostoevsky does not convert his novel into an E. T. A. Hoffmann story, he does destabilize it in a Hoffmann-like way.  “Svidrigailov made him especially uneasy: he even seemed to get stuck, as it were, on Svidrigailov.”  Svidrigailov is Raskolnikov’s most absurd, villainous double, his least “real” double.  He exists, in that he is has scenes with other characters, so is not entirely a figment of Raskolnikov’s imagination, but it often seems like some aspects of him are projections of Raskolnikov’s.

After Svidrigailov brings his series of dreams to their expected melodramatic conclusion – the novel is almost over – Dostoevsky returns to Raskolnikov.  What was he doing during that chapter?  “He’d spent the whole night alone, God knows where.”  He is “disfigured by tiredness, foul weather, physical exhaustion and almost twenty-four hours of inner struggle” (VII.7, 481).  He was out in the rain that soaked Svidrigailov.  This struggle, whatever he had been doing, occurred entirely while Dostoevsky gave his attention to a secondary character.  Dostoevsky never does clear up what Raskolnikov did, except that he thought about killing himself; Svidrigailov did kill himself.

I wondered, why does Dostoevsky direct me away from the central character, especially at such an important moment?  But now I see that he did not.  Instead, he led me through a parody of Raskolnikov’s night, as enacted by his parodic double.  Everything I need to know is there, but on reversed ground.  This is a strange, bold effect.  It makes the entire book more dream-like.

The grotesqueries work the same way.  This is how a police detective interrogates Raskolnikov:

On and on he prattled with his meaningless, empty phrases, occasionally coming out with a few enigmatic words before immediately lapsing back into nonsense again.  By now he was virtually running around the room, making his chubby little legs work faster and faster, keeping his eyes to the floor, tucking his right arm behind his back and continuously waving his left in a variety of gestures, all astonishingly ill-matched to his words.  (IV.5, 315)

This is Svidrigailov’s view of the afterlife:

‘I don’t believe in the life to come,’ said Raskolnikov.

Svidrigailov was deep in thought.

‘What is there’s nothing but spiders there or something like that?’ he suddenly said.  (IV.1, 271)

He means it.  “’[S]ome little room… with spiders in every corner, and that’s it, that’s eternity.’”

Set scenes like this alongside the continual howling, shrieking, and strange gestures of the characters, like the police inspector laughing until he turns purple, take all of this as what is real in Crime and Punishment, hardly distinguishable from what is a dream.

an exceptional resemblance to reality - Crime and Punishment's "Nighttown" chapter

In morbid states dreams are often unusually palpable and vivid, bearing an exceptional resemblance to reality.  The resulting picture may be quite monstrous, but the setting and the unfolding of the entire spectacle are so credible, and the details so fine and unexpected, while artistically consistent with the picture as a whole, that the very same dreamer could not invent them in his waking hours, were he even an artist of the order of Pushkin or Turgenev.  (I.5, 51)

I am quoting not a textbook but Crime and Punishment.  Dostoevsky is introducing the first of the many dreams in the novel – the first in a long series stretching through The Brothers Karamazov.  Much of what looks to me like Dostoevsky’s best writing, the most “fine and unexpected,” I find in the dream scenes.

Part of this first one is on the back cover of the new Penguin edition – axe murder on the front, but something more surprising on the back.  The feverish Raskolnikov, not yet a killer, is a child in his dream, revisiting a traumatic scene that may have happened to him, when he witnessed a drunk peasant beat his old horse to death.

Aside from the psychological relevance to Raskolnikov’s later decision to murder a woman, the scene is packed with elements that reappear throughout the novel.  The scene is even replayed much later in the book, with a woman, the prostitute Sonya’s mother, driven to despair by the cruelties and burdens of her life, breaking down in the street, like the horse, even if she is killed by untreated tuberculosis rather than a beating.  “The nag stretches out her muzzle, sighs heavily and dies” (55); “She gave a deep, deep sigh and died” (V.5, 408).  That sort of thing.

Maybe the dream sequence is too easy.  A writer can pile it full of any old junk, without constraint, and then loot it later.  An axe, flies, specific colors, a “horned headdress,” even a prophetic or coincidental name (the peasant who kills the horse has the same name as a nutcase who falsely accuses himself of Raskolnikov’s crime).  But in Crime and Punishment, the dreams keep coming, bleeding into the “real” world.  The most unusual thing about the horse dream is the first part I quoted, the announcement that the character is dreaming.  Usually it is harder to tell.

A minor character, Svidrigailov, is for much of the novel used as a stock villain, a plot device (eavesdropping, for pity’s sake), plus he serves the dual purpose of creating some phony sympathy for Raskolnikov by being even worse.  He is a melodramatic parody double of Raskolnikov.  At the climax of the novel, when we should be following Raskolnikov, Dostoevsky gives an outstanding chapter (VI, 6) to Svidrigailov, which I called his “Nighttown” chapter a couple of posts ago.  As in the chapter in Ulysses, Dostoevsky frees himself from the “reality” of the novel by pumping up the strangeness, especially by inserting a sequence of interlocking dreams which are only barely distinguishable from the “real” events.

Svidrigailov is in his oddly shaped little hotel room, preparing to do – well, something dramatic.  There are “strange, continuous whispers form the adjoining cell – at times, they were more like shouts.”  Through a crack, Svidrigailov eavesdrops –his recurring device – and witnesses a scene from some other parallel novel, one drunk man lecturing another.  “His friend sat in a chair, with the look of a man who desperately wanted to sneeze but couldn’t.”  All of this is, as far as I can tell, meant to be real.  The dreams have not started yet.

When they do, they pull in a number of elements from other dreams and scenes, plus some new imagery that strongly suggests Svidrigailov is working out his psychological expiation for some horrible crime that Dostoevsky has hinted at previously but otherwise not described.  An aggressive mouse, a drowned girl in a coffin, and so on, weirder and weirder, yet it is outside of the dream where Svidrigailov “looked at them [the flies] for a long time and eventually began trying to catch one with his free right hand” (479, Svidrigailov is often associated with spiders).

The difference between the dream and otherwise becomes arbitrary in this great chapter, just a convention of fiction.

Raskolnikov sneered at this gross and deliberate distortion of his idea

That's from III.5, p. 240.

In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky presents a series of ideas, embodied in characters, for me to distort or ignore.  The saving power of Russian Orthodox monasticism, or the Nietzschean idea that Great Men are allowed a different moral system for the sake of their Greatness.  I found Crime and Punishment far more interesting, though, not as a novel of ideas but as a novel of the psychology of ideas.  Perhaps this is Dostoevsky’s great idea in the late novels, the psychological use of ideas.  That sounds plenty glib.

But I did take it as a real insight when Raskolnikov, near the end of the novel, makes a last desperate run at justifying the murders he committed, including the Great Man nonsense.  “’But that’s all wrong,’” his sister protests.  Raskolnikov replies:

‘The wrong form, you mean – the aesthetics aren’t right!  I just can’t understand it: why is raining down bombs on people, during a regular siege, a more honourable way of doing things?  Fear of aesthetics is the first sign of weakness!  Never, never have I understood this as clearly as now, and never have I understood my crime less!’  (VI.7, 487)

A breakthrough.

In what is I suppose the worst chapter in the novel, two minor characters, one secondary and the other, I don’t know, quaternary, discuss the Utopian reformist ideas of Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done? (1863), the same target as Notes from the Underground (1864), still a fresh subject.  The Chernyshevskian is made by Dostoevsky to do himself in:

‘You don’t understand a thing!  In the commune, this role [prostitute] does not exist.  That’s why people found communes in the first place.  In the commune, the essence of this role will be completely transformed: what is stupid here will become clever there, and what, in the current circumstances, is unnatural here will become entirely natural there.  (V.1, 347)

“What is stupid here will become clever there” is the most perfect distillation of Utopian thought I have ever come across.  What I mean by “worst chapter” is that this piece is completely detachable from the novel.  It is another variation of Dostoevsky’s attack on rationalism, light and comic compared to the murderous theorizing of Raskolnikov.  It is almost a clown scene.  Dostoevsky makes other, more subtle parodic uses of Chernyshevsky’s novel elsewhere in Crime and Punishment.  In this chapter, he just mocks it.

Oliver Ready’s notes do a fine job of covering this ground, but boy am I glad I fought through What Is to Be Done?  The best reason to read that book is to see what Dostoevsky does with it.

Maybe I’ll work on some of the dreams next.

Fear of aesthetics is the first sign of weakness! - notes on Crime and Punishment

We have a bookish curiosity in the house, a paperback Bantam “gift edition” of Constance Garnett’s translation of Crime and Punishment (1866).  There it is on the left, atop the recent U.S. Penguin edition of Oliver Ready’s awesome new translation.

The gift is from the Schering Corporation, “makers of ETRAFON®.”  It is a premium given to doctors by pharmaceutical salesmen.  Please pause for a moment to remember the vanished world of the 1970s, when pharma reps gave doctors not golf junkets or cash bribes, but a classic novel that “contains some clinical descriptions of an interesting and highly complex cluster of symptoms.”

And the novel features exactly that, along with a lot else.  I read Garnett’s version a long time ago, and reading Ready's version this time  I found that I remembered a lot but had completely forgotten anything not directly connected to the central plot – the law student Raskolnikov’s murder, apparently for theoretical reasons, of a hideous old pawnbroker and, by inevitable accident, her innocent idiot daughter; his pursuit by a bumbling, or clever, or both, police detective; his salvation by a hooker with a heart of gold, a device that has not aged well and is not much better in Dostoevsky’s hands.

I wonder how many readers have come at Crime and Punishment as a mystery novel or crime novel without worrying much – perhaps skimming – the more sentimental or digressive or peculiar parts.  It’s a terrific crime novel.  The murder, the psychology of the killer – so much more complex than anything Poe ever tried – and the police interrogations, all terrifically effective stuff.  And memorable.

But this is the part of the novel that is reinforced, that is frequently mentioned by other writers in all sorts of contexts.  Maybe I am remembering them, not Dostoevsky.  I did not remember the chapter (V.1) that is full of mockery of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, nor the nightmarish breakdown of the prostitute’s mother, nor the “Svidrigailov in Nighttown” chapter.  Crazy scenes, big, wild scenes, uniquely Dostoevskian.  Dostoevsky’s many tics would drive me nuts, then a great scene would blast the annoyances away.

Tics meaning, for example and especially, the incessant shrieking and howling, and the constant stage directing of speech and facial expressions:

‘Brother! What are you doing to your mother?’ she whispered, eyes burning with indignation.

He gave her a heavy look.

…

‘Callous, spiteful egoist!’ shrieked Dunya.  (IV.3, 293)

That’s from maybe the worst two-page stretch in the novel, as far as “whispered hotly” and “said, rather strangely” and “said suddenly” goes, the sort of thing that is pounded out of fiction writers today as simultaneously too detailed and too vague.  Or maybe this is the best stretch, since it contains this, which I love:

He seemed to smile, though a smile was the last thing it seemed.  (292)

Once bad writing is pushed far enough, it is no longer bad but inspired, audacious, even, that “highly complex cluster of symptoms” we call art.

Page numbers refer to Oliver Ready’s translation, the first new one in a long time.  It is energetic and zingy compared to Garnett.  It is great fun.

The post’s title is from VI.7, 487.

Every man, whoever he is, must bow down before the Great Idea - some of the ideas in Devils - Oh, how that book tormented him!

“My friends, all of you, everyone: long live the Great Idea!  The eternal, infinite Idea!  Every man, whoever he is, must bow down before the Great Idea.”  (III, 7.3)

This poor fellow, Stepan Trofimovich, died three days later.

In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Great Idea is some kind of return to the principles of Russian Orthodox monasticism.  I do not think that he is quite there yet in Devils, but the cloud of concepts is forming.  This man is dying in the company of a young woman who is an itinerant Bible peddler.  He is trapped by his fever in a village of lakeshore fishermen who make their living gouging travelers waiting for the ferry – they have cast down their nets and become fishers of men!

Michael Katz tells me in the introduction that Devils came out of a proto-novel to be titled Atheism.  The deathbed conversion of this rationalist character – he is some kind of Turgenev-style Superfluous Man – is one remnant of that idea.  Other characters embody different ideologies; I can imagine how some of them were at one point meant to be varieties of atheism, although that notion recedes in the novel Dostoevsky actually wrote.

For example, there are the Chernyshevskians, rationalists who were out to replace the useless reformers of Turgenev’s generation by establishing bookbinding cooperatives and so on.

A book lay open on the table.  It was the novel What is to be Done?...  Oh, how that book tormented him!  (II, 4.2)

Stepan Trofimovich is studying Chernyshevsky in order to defeat his followers’ arguments.  His son, a psychotic revolutionary nihilist, offers  to “’bring [him] something even better,’” which could mean anything.  Could mean, literally, nothing.

The overflow of ideas, of points of view, is, for good readers of Dostoevsky, one of the great strengths of Devils, but presents a real intellectual difficulty.   It would take a lot of work to chase them all down, sort, and absorb them.  Many later writers and critics happily ignore the competing ideas, pulling out the ones they like.  Neither William Faulkner nor the French existentialists had much to do with Dostoevsky’s religious ideas, and they got plenty out of him.  László Krasznahorkai engages with Dostoevsky’s religious side.  I don’t understand it there, either.

Since it is such a strength of Dostoevsky to allow so many voices and perspectives, even ones he loathes, it was a surprise to see how vicious the famous caricature of Ivan Turgenev is.  Sure, he goes after Turgenev’s cosmopolitanism, his ameliorism, sure, sure, but also – this is what shocked me – his prose!

There was always a gorse bush around somewhere (it had to be a gorse or some other plant one needed a botanical dictionary to identify).  And there was always some violet tint in the sky, which, of course, no mortal had ever seen before; that is, everyone had seen it, but on one knew how to appreciate it, while “I,” he said, “looked at it and describe it for you fools, as if it were the most ordinary thing.”  The tree under which the fascinating couple sat had always to be of some orange hue.  (III, 1.3)

Dostoevsky is attacking Turgenev for paying attention to literary art.  This is going to be trouble for me, however inventive his man-sized love spiders.

There is a landscape late in Devils, a rarity in Dostoevsky:

The old, black road, rutted by wheels and bordered by willows, extended before him like an endless thread; to the right lay a bare field where the grain had long since been harvested; to the left – bushes and a wood beyond.  And in the distance – in the distance lay the scarcely visible line of the railway running off at a slant, with smoke rising from a train; but no sound could be heard.  (III, 7.1)

There is not much beauty in Dostoevsky’s Russia.  Not much of anything beyond the constant stream of speech, howls, whimpers, and hysterical laughter.  “’Oh, what a torrent of other people’s words!’” a character shouts (II, 5.3), in what turns out to be another dig at Chernyshevsky (“You’ve even got as far as the new order?  You poor creature!   God help you!”).  Strictly speaking no more words than in any other novel of the same length, yet that is what I come to the book to see, that torrent of half understood words, all somehow made Dostoevsky’s own.

He hated the steak itself - some trouble understanding Dostoevsky's Devils - we'd gaze at him for the rest of our lives and be afraid of him

Writing about Emma, I idly wondered if I should ever write about books I have only read once.  Now I will reinforce the idea by writing about a book I have read once and do not understand.

Of course he was “strange,” but there was much that was unclear about all of this.  There was some hidden meaning to it.  (Part I, Ch. 4.3)

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Devils (1872, tr. Michael Katz) was baffling.  It is the most chaotic Dostoevsky I have ever read, far more so than The Brothers Karamazov (1880), which I had thought was the outer limit for a functioning novel.  Maybe I was right.

“It always seemed that you’d take me off to some place where an enormous, man-sized evil spider lived and we’d gaze at him for the rest of our lives and be afraid of him.  That’s how we’d spend our mutual love.”  (II, 3.1)

Now, I love those lines.  I recently read a Dadaist novel, actually about Dadaists and their associates and ideas, A Brief History of Portable Literature by Enrique Vila-Matas (1985), a deliberately crazy, random  book, but I do not think Vila-Matas got anywhere close to what this (crazy) woman says to her (crazy) lover as they argue about whether they should run away to Switzerland, split up, commit suicide, etc.

The Argumentative Old Git wrote a thorough catalog of the novel’s obstacles to understanding.  The inconsistent narrator, the seemingly random introduction of characters and the way major characters vanish for long stretches and minor characters suddenly take over the book “as Dostoyevsky’s attention is captured by other matters,” the unsettling shifts in tone as a comic novel lurches into terror, and range of semi-coherent and incompatible ideas.

“His sister?  His sick sister?  With a whip?” Stepan Trofimovich cried out, as if he himself had suddenly been thrashed with a whip.  “What sister?  Which Lebyadkin?”  (I, 3.5)

That is just what I had been asking at that exact moment.  How rare to be in such sympathy with a Dostoevsky character.

Some of these problems are artistic flaws, problems Dostoevsky would have fixed if he were the kind of writer who went back and fixed problems.  The abundance of ideas and points of view is not a flaw but a difficulty.  The weird narrator, too, or so I guess after one reading.

The best part of the novel, which jolts into movement after about four hundred pages and really only occupies about 150 pages near the end, is about a small group of revolutionary anarchists who murder one of their associates.  A whole series of violent deaths precede and follow.  Critics frequently refer to Devils, but I do not remember ever seeing a reference that was not to this one part of the novel.   I understand: it is bloody and tense and although nightmarish it is coherent, and is thus memorable.

He counted every piece of steak Peter put into his mouth; he hated him for the way he opened his mouth, chewed his food, and smacked his lips over the fattiest morsels; he hated the steak itself.  (III, 4.2)

Randomness, or what looks like randomness, is very hard to remember.  The first four hundred and large chunks of the last three hundred pages of this novel are going to be darn hard to remember.

They all fall back to hell - an attempt to get some more people to read When Mystical Creatures Attack

When Mystical Creatures Attack by Kathleen Founds, a 2014 comic novel.  Not the kind of thing I normally read.  Blurbs point to or are written by George Saunders, Wells Tower, Karen Russell, and Mark Leyner (who is known, it seems, for his “fearlessness” – rest of y’all writers are cowards), which probably helps pin down Founds in some way.  I have never read any of these writers, barely know who they are.  I paged through the book, thought it was funny – in fact assumed it was more of a kind of humor book than it really is – and bought it.

It was the chapter of Methodist church cookbook recipes that got me, dishes like Valley of the Shadow of Death by Chocolate Cake:

Directions: As the cake rises, call the kids around, and tell them about your girlhood, when you had polio, and Dad made a special sleigh to ride behind the donkey during plowing season, so you could mash manure into the ground with a stick.  We never had luxuries such as Death by Chocolate Cake!  During the winter of ’38, we were so hungry we ate the seed corn.  Then we ate the milk-cow.  Then we ate Andrew.  Andrew was our dog.  Ask the children if they know where Hush Puppies come from.  Then give them their dessert.  (51-2)

Meanwhile, other recipes are actually moving along two stories, one a kind of crisis not of faith but works by the pastor(from a lamb chop recipe: “Ask yourself if, in your longing for clarity and order, you have negated contradiction and paradox…  Fry three minutes on each side.  Garnish with rosemary,” 55), the other a struggle between Janice Gibbs and her new stepmother (“Reply that you do not even consider this cooking,” 54).

The latter is part of the larger story of the novel, the bad decisions and hard times of Janice and a schoolteacher she had for a few months.  Various parallels are made between the two women.  The story is advanced by means of school assignments, email, a misguided advice blog, fiction within the fiction, and regular old fiction.  Many of these would be gimmicks if done badly.

My idea of what the novel was changed a lot as I read it.  A big change came in the chapter where the teacher is writing about her (bad) father:

Dostoevsky Give Us Some Hope

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky tells this story:

A stingy old woman served only herself, save this – she once gave a turnip to a beggar…  The intercessory spirit petitions God, who says:  take that turnip, see if it will drag her out of hell.  (30)

The woman grabs the turnip, and another soul grabs her, and another and another:

“My turnip!” the old woman shouts, when she sees linked souls looping behind her.  She kicks.  She thrashes.

The turnip breaks.  They all fall back to hell.

The teacher, cataloguing her father’s rare acts of kindness, suspects that he, too, would kick and thrash.

Dostoevsky, or his character Grushenka, tells this story in Part III, Book VII, Chapter II, “An Onion.”  Constance Garnett has “onion,” not “turnip.”  Maybe translators disagree.  Maybe Founds thought “turnip” was funnier (it is).  The troubled Grushenka says “it’s a nice story” and identifies herself with the old woman.  She calls herself “wicked,” aside from one good deed.  Typically perverse Dostoevsky psychology – by the end of the story, few readers will find it so reassuring or “nice.”

When Mystical Creatures Attack ends with a heretical inversion of Grushenka’s parable of works and grace that is the farthest possible extension of the idea of novelistic sympathy.  It is an audacious scene that would be worth seeing even if the rest of the book did not seem particularly funny.

I have been discussing the book with nicole at bibliographing.  It has not been reviewed much by book bloggers.  We worry that there is something wrong with the marketing.  Maybe the graphics, all done by Founds herself (see above, borrowed from her website), or the blurbs, make the book look like something it is not, or something that it is but not merely.

when I get on the subject of my cowbells, I get carried away - Hamsun gets carried away

The key place where Hamsun updates Dostoevsky is in Chapter 7, where the oddball outsider Nagel is at a party arguing about Gladstone.  The British Prime Minister, that Gladstone.  I am not entirely sure why this is the context.  Hamsun loathed England and everything about it, and though this would get him in big trouble forty years later, I do not understand it here.  But it is Dostoevsky I am after, Hamsun’s improvement on Dostoevsky:

“He is a tenacious fighter for good causes, daily assumes personal responsibility for justice, truth, and God.  How could he possibly fail?  Two and two is four, truth has conquered, glory be to God!  Now Gladstone can go beyond two and two.  I have heard him claim, in a budget debate, that seventeen times twenty-three is three hundred ninety-one, and he came off with a smashing, enormous victory…  I stood there checking his arithmetic – three hundred ninety-one – and it was correct, yet I turned it over and over in my mind, saying to myself: Wait a minute.  Seventeen times twenty-three is three hundred ninety-seven!  I knew very well that it was ninety-one, but against all logic I decided on ninety-seven, just to oppose this man, this man who made it his business to be in the right.”  (Ch. 7, ellipses mine)

As Dostoevsky’s Underground Man said, “I agree that two times two makes four is a splendid thing, but if we’re going to lavish praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes also a very charming little thing.”  And given that, imagine the insouciant piquancy of 17 x 23 = 397.

Dostoevsky was at this point arguing directly with Nikolay Chernyshevsky, making Mysteries a direct descendant of Chernyshevsky, which is amusing.

Nagel has “a burning need to preserve my conviction of what is right” even when he is “unquestionably” wrong.  How can Hamsun’s characters be of such interest if they are merely insane?  They are fictionally embodied protests against the Enlightenment.  The idea that is so shocking and destructive is that the wrong answer, wrong decision, even wrong moral act is in some psychological way necessary.  Hamsun is after Dostoevsky one of the great early depicters of the kind of irrationalism that is going to preoccupy so many later writers.

The distance created by the third person allows Mysteries to offer a counter-argument, an implicit defense of rationalism tempered by compassion and community.  Nagel is saved from self-destruction at one point, for example, by what I take to be the kind action of the weakest citizen of the town.    My guess is that, given the ambiguities of the novel, Hamsun is recognizing the power and importance of the irrational without endorsing it.  But who knows.

Nagel himself has an oddly quantitative bent.  Another favorite bit from Mysteries:

“Have I told you about my cowbells? Well, I see you don’t know anything about me.  I’m an agronomist, of course, but I have other interests as well.  Thus far I’ve collected two hundred and sixty-seven cowbells.  I began ten years ago and now, I’m happy to say, I have a very fine collection.”  (Ch. 15)

Although, to pick a single line, this earlier mention of the cowbells, used as a kind of pickup line – he later proposes to the woman he is addressing – can’t be beat:

“But to get back to the point – when I get on the subject of my cowbells, I get carried away.”  (Ch. 9)

We can all get behind that kind of irrationalism.  What else am I doing here?

Tonight I made a fool of myself and shocked everyone by my eccentric behavior - Hamsun steals from Dostoevsky

Everyone who reads Hunger compares it to Dostoevsky.  I did it, too.  The voice of the narrator makes him feel like a cousin of a Dostoevsky character, of Raskolnikov or the Underground Man.  The religious and philosophical base is quite different, with Friedrich Nietzsche replacing the Orthodox church.  Boy does that sound glib.  It’s not so far off, though.

Mysteries does not feel so much like Dostoevsky.  Rather it openly rips off Dostoevsky, repeatedly.  Two examples today and one tomorrow.  I’ll bet there are more I missed.

Chapter 8 is the only one with a title: “White Nights.”  That is also the title of a Dostoevskynovella from 1849.  In Hamsun’s novel, weirdo Nagel wanders around in the woods with beautiful Dagny.  He tells her strange stories and falls in love with her.  She is not entirely unresponsive, but they will have to just be friends.  In the Dostoevsky story, replace “the woods” with “St. Petersburg.”  Both stories, the chapter and the novella, successfully represent an ecstatic state caused by some combination of the possibility of romantic love and the strange northern summer night.

I will interrupt myself to note that this chapter begins with the best paragraph in the entire novel:

It was a beautiful night.  The few people who were still on the streets looked gay and animated.  In the cemetery a man was pushing a wheelbarrow and singing to himself, despite the hour.  Everything was so still that his voice was the only sound to be heard.  The town lay sprawled below the doctor’s house like a strange, monstrous insect, flat on its belly with its tentacles stretched out in all directions.  Here and there it would extend a leg or draw in a feeler, as now down on the fjord, where a small steamer glided along seemingly without a sound, leaving a black furrow behind it.

The insect is part of the best single sentence.  Kinda changes the mood a little.  The word “strange” has appeared several times in this post already.

Just as blatant is Hamsun’s parody of The Idiot.  Nagel is a parody of the Christ-like Prince Myshkin, who desires to do good put somehow destroys whatever he gets near.  A major difference is that Nagel is also a devil figure.  He constantly flips from charity to chaos, friend to bully, without warning.  He is manipulative where Myshkin is guileless – but at times he seems to want to be guileless.

The place to see Nagel as Myshkin most clearly is in Chapter 6, when he crashes a party and tells a bizarre and outrageous story of a dream that climaxes with a brutal beating.  Prince Myshkin’s story ends with an execution, so Hamsun has toned it down a bit.  Oddly, in both cases the inappropriate stories end up impressing a woman who would have been better off ignoring at all.

“Tonight I made a fool of myself and shocked everyone by my eccentric behavior in order to get you into a kinder frame of mind so that you would listen to me when I tried to explain.  I succeeded, you listened to me and you understood.”  (Ch. 6)

Mysteries can also be described as a story about a stalker.  Someone who knew more about the subject could write a good piece about that.

If only I were done with Dostoevsky, but I will save the last example for tomorrow.

Not merely nothing to do, but nothing to learn - Dostoevsky defends the humanities

Soon we’ll conceive of a way to be born from ideas.  (II.10., 91)

This will sound archaic, I know, but I first encountered Dostoevsky in a Western Civilization course, where he was read alongside Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and Sigmund Freud, just to stick with his contemporaries, more or less, as if there were some value in the illusion that every undergraduate in the liberal arts read a common set of authors of some importance and difficulty.  How naïve we all were back then.

What is the right way to live, that was the constant question.  Notes from Underground was ethics, not literature.   Every text not related to the history of science was reduced to ethics, or politics.  Maybe I am wrong; maybe even Galileo’s Starry Messenger was reduced to ethics, although I doubt anyone in class argued the side of the Catholic Church.

Of course, after two times two, there’s nothing left, not merely nothing to do, but nothing to learn.  (I.9., 25)

Only now do I see the subtlety of the inclusion of Notes from Underground in Western Civ.  Dostoevsky is attacking the foundation of the university, an attack on the value of reason.  His book is a counter-Enlightenment assault on Chernyshevsky’s radical Enlightenment.  The university, as it exists today, is an Enlightenment enterprise.

At that time, it’s still you speaking, new economic relations will be established, all ready-made, also calculated with mathematical precision, so that all possible questions will disappear in a single instant, simply because all possible answers will have been provided.  Then the crystal palace will be built.  (I.7., 18)

The “crystal palace” is from What Is to Be Done?, “Vera Pavlovna’s 4th Dream,” parts 8, 9, and 10, which depicts life in the rationalist utopia, where everyone lives, eats, and dances in communal structures of glass and aluminum which are lit by electricity and cleaned by child labor.*  And it is also an actual building, the home of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.  Humans turned into ants, says the Underground Man.  Dostoevsky had been horrified by the Crystal Palace and had written about it before Chernyshevsky used the metaphor.  Paradise for one, a nightmare for the other, and one more reason for Dostoevsky to be angry at Chernyshevsky.  Personally, I do not think Ludwig Mies van der Rohe is such a great threat, but I would probably be irritated, too, if someone stole and reversed my metaphor.

These days, I frequently come across attempts to defend or justify the humanities in higher education.  Dostoevsky’s implicit position, that the humanities are the home of the essential irrationality of humankind, is not likely to shake lose any grant money or tenure lines, even though he is right.

*  “More than half the children have remained inside to attend to the housework.  They do almost all the chores and enjoy their work very much.” (What Is To Be Done?, 4, xvi, 8, p. 371).  Proof, even more than the oceans turning to lemonade, that Fourierists were loons.

Quoting the Underground Man - it’s really better in books

I said I might do a post of Dostoevsky quotations.  Why not.  Notes from Underground is so quotable.  The voice of the narrator is so strong.

Now, then, what can a decent man talk about with the greatest pleasure?

Answer: about himself.

Well, then, I, too, will talk about myself. (I.1., 5)

Strong with irony.  One of the great critical debates over Notes has been about this narrator.  To what extent does he represent Dostoevsky?  Many critics, friends and enemies, have taken the book, especially its first third, as distilled Dostoevsky.

A novel needs a hero, whereas here all the traits of an anti-hero have been assembled deliberately; but the most important thing is that all this produces an extremely unpleasant impression because we’ve all become estranged from life, we’re all cripples, every one of us, more or less.  We’ve becomes so estranged that at times we feel some kind of revulsion for genuine “real life,” and therefore we can’t bear to be reminded of it.  Why, we’ve reached a point where we almost regard “real life” as hard work, as a job, and we’ve all agreed in private that it’s really better in books.  (II.10., 91)

This is from the last page, one of the texts declarations that the narrator is not Dostoevsky. This is where it really helps to know that Dostoevsky is parodying Chernyshevsky, and perhaps others, that the Underground Man is an extreme case.  “Soon we’ll conceive of a way to be born from ideas” (91).  None of which means that some pure Dostoevsky is not smuggled into the parody.

In short, man is made in a comical way, obviously there’s some sort of catch in all this.  But two times two makes four is an insufferable thing, nevertheless.  Two times two makes four – why, in my opinion, it’s mere insolence.  Two times two makes four stands there brazenly with its hands on its hips, blocking your path and spitting at you.  I agree that two times two makes four is a splendid thing, but if we’re going to lavish praise, then two times two makes five is sometimes also a very charming little thing.  (I.9., 24)

Dostoevsky and the Underground Man nod in agreement.  They both feel the need for a Counter-Enlightenment blast against Chernyshevky’s radical Enlightenment. ”I felt how they swarmed inside me, these contradictory elements” (I.1., 4).  I am usually an Enlightenment kind of fellow myself, but after a good dose of Chernyshevsky, I too begin revising my multiplication tables.

Although capable of sitting around quietly in the underground for some forty years, once he emerges into the light of day and bursts into speech, he talks on and on and on…  (I.10., 26)

Now I am identifying a little too closely with the Underground Man.

I was ecstatic. I rejoiced and sang Italian arias. - the Underground Man in action

Has the What Is To Be Done? plus Notes from Underground sesquicentennial readalong been a success?  Most of the action in the past couple of days has been in the comments of a Scott Bailey post about tea sandwiches.  I take that as a success.  These are interesting books!

Scott has also put together a handy list of many of the parts of Chernyshevsky’s novel directly parodied by Dostoevsky.  I’m going to look at one of them, the sidewalk bumping scenes.  This is in no way original.  Marshall Berman devotes twenty pages of All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982) to these scenes.  My excuse is that I read that books twenty-five years ago and do not have it at hand.  If you do, skim this and read that.

In Part 3, chapter viii, one of Chernyshevsky’s robot men bumps shoulders on a St. Petersburg street  with a “portly gentleman.”

The gentleman, turning slightly toward Lopukhov, said, “What sort of swine are you, you pig!”  He was about to continue this edifying speech when Lopukhov turned to face him, seized the gentleman in a bear hug, and deposited him in the gutter very carefully.  He stood over him and said, “Don’t move or I’ll drag you out there where the mud is deeper.”  Two peasants came by, looked, and applauded.  (209)

The fat fellow is presumably the young tutor’s social superior in some obvious way.  Everyone is happy to see him get his comeuppance.  The revolution must be just around the corner.

Some parts of What Is To Be Done? seem to have enraged Dostoevsky, but this one must have made him laugh (those peasants).  It led to one of his all time great comic scenes.  It begins in a billiards parlor:

As soon as I set foot inside, some officer put me in my place.

I was standing next to the billiard table inadvertently blocking his way as he wanted to get by; he took hold of me by the shoulders and without a word of warning or explanation, moved me from where I was standing to another place, and he went past as if he hadn’t even noticed me.  I could have forgiven even a beating, but I could never forgive his moving me out of the way and entirely failing to notice me.  (II, 1, 34)

I can imagine Ralph Ellison reading this passage with great interest.

Unlike Chernyshevsky’s buff heroes, the Underground Man is “small and scrawny,” so he can only plot his revenge.  A duel, perhaps (duel fantasy follows, the first of two in the novel).  Or a satirical article in the newspaper (submitted; rejected).  He encounters the officer on the Nevsky Prospect, always stepping aside for his superiors, as does the narrator, as does everyone.

Then a most astounding idea suddenly dawned on me.  “What if,” I thought, “what if I were to meet him and…  not step aside?  Deliberately not step aside, even if it meant bumping into him: how would that be?”  The bold idea gradually took such a hold that it afforded me no peace.  I dreamt about it horribly, incessantly, and even went to Nevsky more frequently so that I could imagine more clearly how I would do it.  I was in ecstasy.  (37)

But what gloves should he wear, black or lemon-colored?  Is his shirt nice enough (no)?  And what about his old overcoat, with a raccoon collar?  Impossible.  The Underground Man goes into debt, humiliating himself before his boss, to buy a nicer collar.

Even this is not enough to give the Underground Man courage, but he finally does succeed.  “Naturally, I got the worst of it; he was stronger, but that wasn’t the point.”

I returned home feeling completely avenged for everything.  I was ecstatic.  I rejoiced and sang Italian arias.  (39)

All of this is in a single two-and-a-half page paragraph.  The “Italian arias” could not be improved upon.

Between Chernyshevsky and Dostoevsky there is a difference about how people behave, what they fundamentally are like, that is irreconcilable.  One pictures a world free of humiliations, a world of small, meaningful triumphs; the other says we create the former and imagine the latter.  One enjoys a fantasy of perfectibility; the other is horrified. 

You’re wrong about that, too - starting Notes from the Underground

Didn’t we all have fun with Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 What Is To Be Done?  And we have not even gotten to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s parodistic novella written a year later, Notes from the Underground, as it is commonly known, or Memoirs from a Mousehole as Nabokov charmingly calls it.  The little book otherwise lacks charm.  It begins with a thirty page rant by a madman, which is followed by sixty pages of a narrative of self-destruction and self-loathing culminating in a particularly vile act.  It is the finest of Dostoevsky’s comedies, I think, an early masterpiece of the comedy of humiliation.

Notes from the Underground also swallows What Is To Be Done? whole and transforms it into something new.  Knowing both books, it is beyond my capabilities to read one book independent of the other.  Dostoevsky is, obviously, the greater artist and thinker, but the books enrich each other.

Perhaps I should mention that just like the original Russian readers I have always read the books together.  Strike the part in italics for the truth, but I do know that Michael Katz’s 1989 edition of What Is To Be Done? was a brand new book when I bought and read it, which must have been just after I read Fathers and Sons and Dostoevsky and Nabokov’s Chernyshevsky-bashing The Gift.  I have been looking for a cluster of books like this ever since.  I did not understand at that point the extent to which Dostoevsky kept returning to the argument in his major novels, how characters with Chernyshevsky in their blood inhabit all of Dostoevsky’s major novels.

I have expressed skepticism and perhaps mockery of Dostoevsky’s art and ideas, but it is exciting to watch him at work.

The underground man, as I take him, is one of Chernyshevsky’s rational egoists intellectually, but is emotionally a bundle of neuroses, prejudices, and impulses (“caprices,” to use Chernyshevsky’s word).  He is a Chernyshevsky character with a human personality, with a soul.  It is like on Buffy the Vampire Slayer; you remember.  So Dostoevsky is attacking Chernyshevsky by taking his ideas to their illogical end.

This seems to be the heart of a century of critical debate about the novel, by the way.  Is the underground man mocking Chernyshevsky; does he agree with but also rebel against Chernyshevsky; or is he simply Dostoevsky’s mouthpiece?  I pick the middle option, the more subtle one.  In addition, is the underground man crazy, or really, how crazy is he, or more accurately, why is he so crazy?

You probably think, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you.  You’re wrong about that, too.  I’m not at all the cheerful fellow I seem to be, or that I may seem to be…  (I.2, 5)

Like Chernyshevsky’s narrator, the underground man argues with and mocks his imaginary readers.  Other images and scenes recur.  I will write about them.  Why else did I read these books if not to write about the parallel scenes where the protagonists bump into an officer on the street?

Maybe the next post will be all quotations, to balance this one.  Notes from the Underground is almost too quotable.  It is a distraction.

Page references to the Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition, translated by Michael Katz.

The Nikolai Chernyshevsky What Is to Be Done? readalong - if I hadn’t warned you, you might have thought that this tale was being told artistically

Literature can’t be all fun and Moomins, can it?  So in the tradition of the 2010 readalong of Herman Melville’s Clarel and the 2011 Anything Ubu Readalong Opportunity I am announcing the Wuthering Expectations What Is to Be Done? reading event.  Some of you said you wanted it.  I hold no one to any rashly made promise.

No, I am kidding, this will be fun.  And educational.  Mostly educational.

Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What Is to Be Done? is a radical socialist Utopian novel written while in prison, waiting to be tried for a bunch of trumped up nonsense for which he was eventually convicted and sent to Siberia.  Given that Chernyshevsky was in prison because as an editor and essayist he was seen as a threat to the state, the fact that he was allowed to write and publish What Is to Be Done? is almost inexplicable.  This was the novel that prepared the ground for revolution.  Its importance in Russian intellectual history is immense.

The novel is full of idealized people doing idealized things.  The novels of Jean-Jacques Rousseau served as Chernyshevsky’s models.   Another inspiration was Hard Times, but Chernyshevsky thought Dickens wasted too much time on trivialities like love and happiness.  Another great influence was Georges Sand, and the novel is openly feminist in the usual fashion of 19th century Utopians – if society is to reform, marriage and family must reform, too.

What Is to Be Done? was a direct response to the nihilist protagonist of Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862); it in turn inspired Fyodor Dostoevsky to write Notes from the Underground (1864).  Dozens of other novels spun off of this remarkable chain of books.  Here is the problem:

I possess not one bit of artistic talent.  I even lack full command of the language.  But that doesn’t mean a thing; read on, dearest public, it will be well worth your while.  Truth is a good thing; it compensates for the inadequacies of any writer who serves its cause.  Therefore, I shall inform you of the following: if I hadn’t warned you, you might have thought that this tale was being told artistically and that its author possessed great poetic talent.  But now that I’ve warned you that I possess no talent whatever, you know that any merit to be found in my tale is due entirely to its truthfulness.  (Preface, p. 48)

I do not believe much of this is meant ironically.  What Is to Be Done? is, by most aesthetic measures, a bad novel.  Wooden, ridiculous, dull, ethically dubious, linguistically flat.  Yet it is not actually incompetent like these horrors recorded by Adam Roberts, books by authors who seem to have trouble with the elementary use of language.  Chernyshevsky is rhetorically sophisticated, at least.  Structurally, too.  The book can be read; I have read it.

Still, Chernyshevsky’s literary importance depends as much on Dostoevsky as on his own book.  He makes Notes from the Underground even more interesting.

Maybe I should have called this the Notes from the Underground readalong.  It is that book’s 150th anniversary, after all, and I will read it along with Chernyshevsky.  Maybe I should – no, no – take your vitamins.

No, read what you want!  Say that you are interested in the intellectual history but put off by the 400 didactic pages of the novel itself.  That is fine.  I recommend, besides Fathers and Sons and Notes from the Underground, something from the following list:

The “Russian Populism” chapter in Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers (1978).

The relevant chapter of Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts into Air (1982).

Chapter 4 of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift (1938) – the entire novel, really, one of the great novels of the 20th century, but that chapter, a fictional biography of Chernyshevsky, is detachable.  It is so detachable that it was in fact censored by its original publisher.  It is a strange story.  Nabokov’s critique is aesthetic yet also ethical – ethics by means of aesthetics.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Devils (1872) – he keeps returning to the subject.

Leo Tolstoy’s book What Is to Be Done? (or What Then Must We Do? or something similar, 1886).

Vladimir Lenin’s essay “What Is to Be Done?” (1902).

Erik McDonald of XIX Bek is actually translating a NikolaiLeskov novel that is another response to Turgenev and I think to Chernyshevsky.  Perhaps Erik will have more suggestions.

The quotation is translated by Michael Katz, in the 1989 Cornell University Press edition, which was brand new when I first read it.  Strangely, the first two English translations both date from 1886, and there is a later Soviet translation, too, but you are nuts if you read anything but the Katz translation.  The others are bowdlerized, for one thing, with some of the sexual material removed, and it would be ironic to the point of pathos to read this novel in a censored form.

How does April sound?  End of April?  This is a novel for the spring.

You are nothing but underground vileness - Dostoevsky's Dostoevskyness

I enjoyed The Eternal Husband, Dostoevsky’s little 1870 novel, so much not because it is uncharacteristic of Dostoevsky but because it deliberately creates some distance from the intense Dostoevskyan qualities associated with his most famous books.  Meaning that the central character, Velchaninov, is not going to murder his landlady and her daughter with an axe, but his old friend Pavel Petrovich might well murder Velchaninov.  The main character does what so many Dostoevsky readers do to this day – accuse other Dostoevsky characters of being lunatics.

One promising track would be to follow Velchaninov’s transformation into a Dostoevsky character, into a man who could say all of this:

“Go to hell!” Velchaninov yelled suddenly, in a voice not his own, as though something had exploded in him.  “Go to hell with your underground vileness; you are nothing but underground vileness.  You thought you’d scare me – you base man, torturing a child; you scoundrel, you scoundrel, you scoundrel!” he shouted, beside himself, gasping for breath at every word.  (Ch. 9)

The character introduced in the first chapter would have been incapable of this outburst, but his entanglement with the drunk, earnest, potentially homicidal Pavel Petrovich slowly sucks him into histrionic Dostoevsky World – “in a voice not his own,” how curious.

The story is fundamentally comic, which means Valchaninov is lucky enough to escape his tormentor and a continuing bout of Dostoevskyness.  The next to last chapter begins:

A feeling of immense, extraordinary relief took possession of him; something was over, was settled; an awful weight of depression had vanished and was dissipated forever.  So it seemed to him.  It had lasted for five weeks.  He raised his hand, looked at the towel soaked with blood and muttered to himself: “Yes, now everything is absolutely at an end!”  (Ch. 16)

You can see that it was a close-run thing.  This chapter is titled “Analysis,” and much of it amounts to the character summarizing his own story, as if he were Hercule Poirot solving a murder mystery.  In this case an attempted murder, his own: “He recognized clearly that he had escaped a terrible danger.”  Velchaninov is able to return to the meaningless, selfish existence described in the first chapter.

I would have to reread the book to see how true any of this is.  It sounds like a good idea for a novel, but that does not mean it is actually to be found in this novel as anything but a hint.

The Eternal Husband was good, clean fun, but I think for my next Dostoevsky I will dive straight into the underground vileness and revisit Notes from the Underground, which is a different kind of fun.

The translation is by Constance Garnett.

The Eternal Husband, Dostoevsky from a distance

Literary history abounds with heartbreaking episodes of utter destitution.  Dostoevsky, for instance, finding himself stranded abroad, penniless and starving, write The Eternal Husband in a last attempt to obtain emergency relief from his publishers.  But as he was about to dispatch the manuscript on which his last hope rested, he discovered that he did not even have the money for the postage.

This is the story as Simon Leys tells it.*  I have read it elsewhere.  Perhaps it is even true.  It is all too plausible.  I would never have guessed Dostoevsky’s desperation or anything like it from the little novel itself.

Velchaninov is in St. Petersburg attending to a lawsuit when he runs into his old friend Pavel Pavlovitch Trusotsky, whose wife has recently died.  Velchaninov had had an affair with the wife nine years ago.  Does Pavel Pavlovitch know about the affair?  He is accompanied by a nine year-old daughter – is she really the child of Velchaninov?

It sounds a little soapy, doesn’t it?  Yet that is not at all how it feels.  Two main reasons:

1.  The plot keeps bending.  Every chapter has a kind of kink in it that pushes the story off of whatever course it was on, like it is aiming for a point due north but keeps bending away from the goal, like Dostoevsky’s compass is faulty.  The existence of the daughter, for example, is the surprise of Chapter 5.  Velchaninov takes her away from her abusive father – ah, this is the story, about the biological father and his daughter – but her death is the surprise of Chapter 10.  The novel is only half done.  No, the book is about something else.

Maybe this is still kind of soapy.  But the plot has bends, not twists.  It kept me on my toes.  My guess is that Dostoevsky knew where he wanted the story to end, but allowed himself a lot of freedom along the way.  The short, episodic chapters support this guess.  It is easy enough to imagine him pacing around, dictating a coherent little unit of story, then knocking it off kilter when he begins the next chunk.

2.  The Eternal Husband is 140 pages in The Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, and like many of his Great Short Works it has a stable point of view.  No room for the rich cacophony of the long novels.  The Underground Man, the Gambler, and now Velchaninov are who we’re stuck with, although Velchaninov does not narrate the story himself.

What is interesting here is that unlike the first two I mentioned, Velchaninov is not a typical Dostoevsky character.  He is venal, lecherous, and selfish; he is not any sort of spiritual seeker and no one would mistake him for a lunatic.  The lunatic is Pavel Pavlovitch, the eternal husband, who is a real, pure Dostoevsky character.  So the fun of the book, the unusual thing, is that we get some distance from the bizarre intensity that is so common throughout his fiction.  It is Dostoevsky with distance.

I enjoyed the book a lot, but I am not a Dostoevskian, meaning the readers who ponder the meaning of “The Grand Inquisitor” rather than its art.  They likely find The Eternal Husband  trivial.

Not a single quotation from the book itself.  Let’s fix that tomorrow.

* From the essay “Writers and Money” in The Hall of Uselessness (2013), p. 266.

The unusual case of Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons (1862) is so rich, so important, and so well-written that I assumed I would have a lot to write about it.  Well.  But when did that ever stop me?

The strangest side of the novel is its importance, its place in the intellectual history of Russia.  It was a surprise to its author, certainly.  Ivan Turgenev spent much of the rest of his writing life returning to the ideas of the novel and responding to his critics.  Even more amazingly, so did other writers including Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I do not know of another chain of novels like this one.  What Is to Be Done?, a novel by the radical journalist Nikolai Chernyshevksy appeared in 1863, in direct response to Turgenev.  Then in 1864 Dostoevsky published Notes from the Underground, an attack on Chernyshevsky.  Dostoevsky, like Turgenev, pursued his ideas into later novels, particularly Demons (1872) and one wild scene in The Idiot (1869).  Tolstoy responded, although I think rather more indirectly.  One of Vladimir Nabokov’s finest pieces of writing, Chapter 4 of The Gift (1938), piles onto Chernyskevsky.  I have no doubt there are dozens of other branches that I have not even heard of.  Soviet critics continued the debate decades into the twentieth century.

Still, it is that first, compact chain, 1862 – Fathers and Sons, 1863 – What Is to Be Done?, 1864 – Notes from the Underground, that I marvel at.  The central issues of the day engaged at the highest intensity in fiction.  As art, the episode did well, too, with two masterpieces, one of them a rare case of a genuine philosophical novel.  The Chernyshevsky book is pretty bad, and likely the most influential of the lot, a book that did real damage.

What most amazes of course is the place fiction had in Russian intellectual life at the time.

The intellectual history and the art of Fathers and Sons are cleanly separable.  I have seen this demonstrated:  Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Fathers and Children,” found in Russian Thinkers (1978), is all about the debate, while Nabokov’s notes in Lectures on Russian Literature (1981) are entirely about the art.  Both perspectives are valuable, but they are only barely related.  The book was unnecessarily well-written for the debate it sparked.  And if it had been politely ignored we would still read it as the finest Turgenev novel.

I have avoided mentioning – hinting at – what any of the ideas of the novel are or why they caused such a turmoil, or anything else about what the novel might actually be like.  Good, that gives me something to write about.

Some people might lose their faith by looking at that painting! - Dostoevsky looks at paintings

The Idiot is a murder story, a mystery story investigating a homicide, the death of this man:

Image from Wikipedia. The Hans Holbein painting is in Basel, where Dostoevsky saw it many times.  A copy of it hangs in a house where, in the novel, a murder will take place.

‘That painting!’ the prince exclaimed suddenly, under the impact of a sudden thought.  ‘That painting! Some people might lose their faith by looking at that painting!’  (II, 4)

Or gain their faith, depending on what they make of Christ shown so clearly as human.  The image is foreshadowing, although given Dostoevsky’s improvisation, at the point the painting first appears, a third of the way through the novel, it is fair to ask:  foreshadowing of what?  The author will figure that out by the end of the novel.

This Holbein painting pulls us back into Part I of the novel, the single day in two hundred pages in which the holy fool Prince Myshkin is reintroduced to Russia after a long stay in Switzerland, where he too got to know the Holbein.  He mentions another Holbein, a Madonna in Dresden, but this is merely a hint of the motif.  The strongest connection is to another Basel painting, not specified by Myshkin, that portrays the moment before an execution.  Myshkin then describes, in a two page paragraph, a painting he imagines on that subject, “’exactly a minute before death,’” although his description includes the prison, the awakening and transport of the condemned man and his thoughts along the way before he gets to the scaffold, the guillotine, and the priest.

“Paint the scaffold so that only the last stair can be seen clearly and closely; the condemned man has stepped on it: his head, white as paper, the priest holding out the cross, the man extending his blue lips and staring – and knowing everything.  The cross and the head – that is the painting, the face of the priest, of the executioner, of his two assistants and a few heads and eyes from below – all that may be painted on a tertiary level, as it were, in a mist, as a background…  That’s what the painting should be like.”  (I, 6, ellipses in original)

This is told to a trio of beautiful young women Myshkin has just met.  He is a little awkward as a conversationalist.  You should see the story he tells next, in Part I, Chapter 6, in a single uninterrupted twelve page paragraph.

Strangely, eighty pages into the novel, this is the second time Myshkin has described the moment before an execution.  He first does so in the second chapter, again, using a long single paragraph.

“When you put your head right under the guillotine and hear it sliding above your head, it’s that quarter of a second that’s most terrible of all.  This isn’t my imagination, you know, many people have said the same thing…  Take a soldier and put him right in front of a cannon in a battle and fire it at him, and he’ll go on hoping, but read out a certain death sentence to that same soldier, and he’ll go mad, or start to weep.  Who can say that human nature is able to endure such a thing without going mad?  Why such mockery – ugly, superfluous, futile?  Perhaps the man exists to whom this sentence has been read out, has been allowed to suffer, and then has been told: ‘Off you go, you’ve been pardoned.’  A man like that could tell us, perhaps.  Such suffering and terror were what Christ spoke of.  (I,2, ellipses mine)

I quoted that passage at some length because it is so clearly related to Dostoevsky’s own experience in 1849, when his own execution by firing squad was commuted moments before the guns went off.

And what comes up just a few pages later?  A painting, of course – the painting of a character who will, by the end of the novel seven hundred pages later, be murdered.

I am in a sense constructing a better novel out of pieces of the book Dostoevsky actually wrote, but the pieces all are right there, put in place by the author for anyone to use.
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